I shake my head. I can feel his shirt getting wet. “I should have explained it better. Caught on to his games—”
He pulls me up, cupping my face. “No. Justno, okay? It’s not on you. It’s fucking not.”
I nod because I can see he won’t budge here. Nicholas moves his hands down but leaves them on my shoulders.
“When he left, I decided I can’t let that happen again. To anyone. Then I met Sam in college, and I finally found a way to make sure no werewolf can evade justice.”
Nicholas pulls me back into his chest. “I get it now. I’m so sorry it happened to you, baby. I’ll find that motherfucker, and I’ll kill him. I promise you.”
Reluctantly, I pull away from his embrace. “Sam has been looking for him for years. We thought we finally had a lead. But if you say the Bureau was aware of Adrian all along, and they still haven’t found him, then maybe this is a dead end too?”
Sighing, Nicholas pulls me back in. “I need to hold you for a second, okay? Don’t be difficult.”
I roll my eyes. “If you need it.” I sink deeper into his embrace, wrung out but lighter somehow.
“I don’t know what the Bureau has yet. But I promise you, baby, we’ll find him.”
I nod once, my body going limp against his. He's got me.
Chapter Twenty
Fresh Corpses, Familiar Doubts, and Frosty Receptions
Nick
“What am I looking at here?” Sam asks, leaning back against his chair in my living room.
“Wha—”
Elliot interrupts me. “What don’t you get? The top row has all the victims.” He walks up to the board and points. “These here are the next possible victims. And the right ones are the Bureau people who were present around the victims at the time of their deaths.” He blinks back at Sam.
“Uh, right. And we’ve made it this complicated to maintain confidentiality in case anyone accidentally finds it?” Sam frowns some more at the board.
I narrow my eyes. “You know I still don’t buy his alibi.” I turn to Elliot. “Can I please arrest him?”
Elliot snorts. “For being stupid? Unfortunately not.”
Sam glares at him. “As the only person with an IQ of one sixty-two in this room, I say we have nothing here.” He gestures toward the board with an open palm.
“No one asked you.” I flop down on the third chair in the room. “But yeah, we’ve got nothing. Keeping an eye on the open Bureau cases has been a bust, too. We won’t be able to keep that on for long.”
Sam adjusts in the chair and looks at Elliot hesitantly.
“What?” I ask.
Elliot sighs. “Sam hacked into some of the cameras around these people’s places. We can keep the surveillance going.”
That fills me with some hope because Meena has already started pulling people back from the case, so it was increasingly becoming a problem to find people available for lookout duties.Wait. “How did you figure out who we’re investigating?” I don’t remember sharing that information with either of them.
Sam leans back in the chair. “C’mon, Nickelodeon. I’ll tell you how, and then you’ll get angry, and then we’ll go through the whole cycle again. Do you really want to go through all of that again, a day after your epic reunion with your boyfriend? Aren’t we better than that?”
I narrow my eyes. “You—”
“Didn’t you say something about the Bureau looking for Raymond for decades? What was that all about?” Elliot interrupts me.
I know what he’s doing, but I give in. Because as angry as he makes me, Sam is right. I don’t want to do anything to upset Elliot again. I lean forward on the chair, taking his hand. He doesn’t snatch it away, which is progress. Making Sam uncomfortable is just a bonus.
“I asked Meena to forward me everything we have on him.” She wasn’t happy about doing it without any information. “Apparently, he has a long history of treating humans as disposable. We don’t know if there was any motivation behind all the killings—”
